Did you know that Lord of the Rings was released 12 years after The Hobbit?
At the beginning of 2014 I had a great idea for a novel series. So I sat down and started working on it. Filling up notebooks with cramped handwritten drafts of a meandering story, meeting new characters, discovering new places, taking my very simple idea and watching it blossom into something huge and detailed. When someone works on a big project for a long time like that, even if they don't talk about it, the people around them know about it. So, since 2016, two years after starting work on the series, my mom has been asking me if I am about ready to find a literary agent for my book.
This stresses me out to no end.
It is not my mom's intention to stress me out, she is being encouraging, she believes in me and believes that my book is good even though she has not read it, and she wants to see me successful and published. It still stresses me out because it is not finished yet and whenever she asks me about it I feel this pressure that is should be finished. It has taken too long for me to finish it and "OH NO WHAT'S WRONG WITH ME THAT IT'S NOT FINISHED!"
I have to remember, it took 12 years for Tolkien, the father of the modern fantasy genre, to write Lord of the Rings after publishing The Hobbit. I would be willing to bet that he was stewing on and working on all of those ideas for a long time before that.
Writing is such a strange profession. On the one hand a project can be quick and simple. I can pound out an essay like this in an afternoon, sometimes several in an afternoon, but that is just one essay. It is a flash scene of my life not an intricate over arching project like a novel series. Writing a first draft of a novel can take months. Editing it can take so much longer. I have to remember that about creating. it isn't like my essay collections that took less than six months to write. It is a whole other beast.
I think it is important for all of us to remember that when we feel outside pressure to complete something or feel like we are failing just because we are moving at a different pace than others.
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